Git CRLF changes showing up in git status

Question

I know there are a ton of questions/answers similar to this one, however I could not find a specific answer to this problem. We are a .net shop and are using git.

I would like a way to ignore CRLF (^M) changes to files when doing a git status. While developing, other processes are occasionally modify files and injecting the CRLF, ultimately resulting in them showing as modified when a git status is done. I have the line "* text=auto" within my .gitattributes file in order to normalize line endings at checkout/commit but this is not what I am looking for. I have also tried to add the following to the git config (core.whitespace=cr-at-eol) but they still show as modified.

How do I tell git to ignore all changes to CRLF (^M)?

Answer 1

You cannot ignore types of filechanges for git status. You can use .gitignore to ignore entire files. And you can use the various whitespace options to transform what is committed, what is highlighted (in red) or shown at all in the diff and commit views.

The reasons you cannot ignore these filechanges are:

• Tracking filechanges is the entire point of version control.
• Git represents file contents independent of path by using a SHA1 hash of the contents. Your ^M affects that SHA1 so that makes it unavoidably significant.

In short, you probably need to fix your other processes or develop clean-up post-processes. Alternatively you could use:

git diff-files --name-status --ignore-space-at-eol

This is not a perfect analogue of status proper, but it might be enough for your needs. For convenience, you can even build a git-alias'd "statusx" command by adding to your .gitconfig:

[alias]
    statusx = diff-files --name-status --ignore-space-at-eol

There are some additional whitespace options if that proves inadequate: --ignore-space-change and --ignore-all-space. See git diff --help for more detail.